Can you name the general manager who made this very logical statement?

“There’s horrible math involved here,” [mystery GM] said in a wide-ranging conference call in advance of the [trade] deadline… “Any mathematician will tell you that we’re all crazy. Collective pronoun again: we’re all nuts. Because there’s 30 teams. There’s one parade. After the first round, there’s only eight teams playing … The math is horrible.

“But the human element … there’s that optimism we all share, that belief we’re missing that one piece. Second, your team expects it. Your players are looking to you to add weapons for this last part of the race.

“So we all get sucked in. We all make poor decisions and brilliant decisions. Some guys have made brilliant decisions at the trade deadline that have won them rounds, carried them farther than they should go. But for every guy that makes a brilliant decision, there are five or six of us that made poor ones that same day. It’s an awful day, it’s an exciting day, it’s a day full of magic, and a day full of very poor decision making.”

The answer after the jump.

The quotee is Toronto Maple Leafs’ Brian Burke.

But isn’t this true of basketball also? Are we “nuts” to think that a couple years down the road, the Toronto Raptors might have their championship parade?